After reflecting on the thematic evolution of business history as a field over the past 50 years, this revised presidential address invites readers to consider the potential payoffs of expanding the contexts in which business historians work together on research projects, as well as with colleagues from cognate fields and with students. In addition to charting the steady growth in collaborative research among business historians since 2000, the essay also identifies areas that especially lend themselves to this mode of historical inquiry, including comparative or transnational analysis that requires detailed knowledge of multiple societies, the development of oral history projects, and the use of data science techniques. It concludes by exploring the advantages of incorporating interdisciplinary research teams into curricular structures, using the example of the Bass Connections program at Duke University.

This article explores the formation and early history of the American Institute of the City of New-York, which in the 1830s became the leading lobby association of “friends of industry” in the United States. More specifically, the article considers how the institute’s officers sought to overcome obstacles of collective mobilization that had plagued earlier pro-industry associations. Pre–Civil War interest groups is an understudied area, and historians typically depict the years following in the Compromise of 1833 as a period essentially devoid of pro-industry agitation. However, it was in precisely in these years that friends of industry for the first time managed to obtain the resources necessary for sustained mobilization. Key to the American Institute’s success, this article argues, was the development of annual manufacturing fairs, events that provided steady revenue, strengthened internal cohesion, attracted new members, facilitated coordination with like-minded groups, and provided opportunities to engage in popular politics in an ordered manner.

Despite the relevance of bankruptcy law for a number of key issues regarding business functioning and organization, little is known about the features and evolution of these legal institutions over time and space. This paper starts to fill this gap in current knowledge by analyzing a new data set providing consistent information about key features of bankruptcy law between 1850 and 2015 in the thirty largest European economies. Regarding institutional change, our analysis supports the established view of a link between macroeconomic changes and the introduction of procedures alternative to bankruptcy. However, this process shows significant differences at the national level, making it difficult to support the idea of change as the result of belonging to a given legal system (French; common law; Scandinavia; Germanic), or the degree of economic development. Instead, change in bankruptcy institutions seems to be a product of, and contributor to, the wider process of individual state formation. Similarly, the features of bankruptcy procedures seem to confirm this picture: Looking at their possible outcomes, the right to begin proceedings, and degree of application to different types of debtors, national differences appear deep and persistent, despite a generalized pattern of convergence over time toward a less punitive approach to bankruptcy. Contact Information: University of Birmingham, Birmingtonham Business School, University House, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, West Midlands, B15 2TY, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. E-mail: [email protected]